GSoC mid-term evaluation

Ingo Schommer,
23 July 2012

Ingo Schommer, as one of the core SilverStripe developers, is one of the SilverStripe mentors on the Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Apart from mentoring a student himself he is also overseeing all running SilverStripe GSoC-projects.

Our Google Summer of Code projects have passed the half-way mark, and we’re happy to report that the majority of students are on track with their work. Here’s a big kudos to them for getting their projects over the first line, and to their seven mentors who guided them in their spare time. Watch out on the dev mailinglist for their status updates (or subscribe to all GSOC activity).

We asked each team for a high-level update, and what they are currently working on. Here is what they told us:

"Early on we decided to switch the existing proof-of-concept to the Behat/Mink library and its been a fantastic journey. The browser tests are running, and we’ve covered basic operations of most CMS areas. The custom Behat extension even allows the loading of SilverStripe fixtures and interacting with its database. Next step is the file fixture upload and more test coverage."

"Content personalization is hard, but I have narrowed it down to a useful base API. The API is centered around technical audience type definitions, combined with personalized content blocks in templates (tutorial). This module is designed to be extensible. The module has 5 built-in conditions including Location, Device, New comer, etc and the user can also add their own condition. I am currently working on targeting users by their geographic location."

After some architectural brainstorming on the mailinglist (thread), the project unfortunately got stuck in the analysis phase and some unrelated roadblocks. Together with Wojtek and his mentor Mateusz, SilverStripe decided not to continue the project within GSOC. Wojtek has been instrumental in streamlining the 2.4 UI during GHOP 2008, and picked up the new work quickly. We still hold him in high regard and wish him all the best. We don't want to drop the validation feature all together, so we might ask you at some point to get involved in its inception and completion.

"I have been busy integrating Paypal into to existing payment module, including writing some unit tests. Testing these complex interactions is hard, so my current task is to look at better ways to create mock objects on payment gateways."

"I have been making progress in unifying the various manifests in core. The manfests are all managed by a central application object, which will form the basis for a more sophisticated module management."

Andrew is a seasoned SilverStripe community member and he has made excellent progress in this project. Meanwhile, the Composer dependency manager is gaining traction in the PHP world, and we’re very happy to have Andrew around to get us onto this amazing technology.

"I am making good progress developing a new module management system based on SS3 and Composer. I have been in frequent contact with my mentor at SilverStripe and we have been working together to make the code clean, efficient and maintainable. With this strong basis we can now focus on improving the usability of the new module management system by adding features such as search and legacy support for Subversion repositories (in addition to Git)."

"The project is coming along nicely, we have a proof of concept interface which shows log messages as they occur, and UI elements for performing common development tasks like flushing the template cache. The dashboard integrates with the core logging service, and can be filtered by URL. I am also basing some work off the existing dbprofiler module, which provides a more fine-grained insight into queries. Next up is a way to view the dashboard alongside the current page."